Do you know you can travel around the world within the four painted walls of your room? I know you would ask that question, okay, the answer to that  ‘how’   is through reading. Oh yes!  To anywhere of your choice, Asia, Europe, America, you name it. But why the saturnine face? Or are you still blue because you think you are not a proficient reader? Worry no more, Brai has got you covered in tackling your common reading mistakes and how to fix them.

So, fasten your seatbelt, while I take you on a ride to places you can fix the problems robing you to see the world. 

As you and I both know Reading to be the act of ascribing meanings from printed words. So it is through it, students expand their vocabulary and learn about the world. 

But today, the majority of readers are confronted with reading errors or mistakes, which have become an obstacle in their comprehension and understanding. 

Furthermore, the common reading mistakes have turned a great number of adults indolent when it comes to reading.

Common Reading Mistakes You Should Put an End to

1. Avoid Vocalization

Vocalization entails making sounds with the voice. Hence, this is one of the most common mistakes most readers make while reading. The mistakes of vocalization may as well be seen as the mistake of reading out loud. It entails too much oral reading, which slows down the reader’s reading pace. In so doing, it takes away understanding and comprehension of what has been read.

However, this happens on most occasions as a result of the complexity of the reading material or the reader lacks vocabulary comprehension. You can overcome this challenge by discipline yourself to always read silently or within yourself.  

Also, you should try as much as possible to study more vocabulary in your leisure time, as this will familiarize you with new words.  

2. Repetition is Another Common Mistake Most Readers Do

Repeating sentences after reading is another most common mistake made while reading. Among the reasons for this is when you vocalize while reading. 

Hence,  you probably tend to forget most phrases and sentences as a result, which will automatically trigger repetition.

Furthermore, repetition may be a result of the complexity of the material or because of the reader’s poor comprehension of vocabulary as the case may be with vocalization. 

As the Same case with vocalization, you can tackle this issue by taking your time in developing your vocabulary skills. 

3. Word Guessing Is Bad for You

This particular scenario once happened to me. An SMS message from a sister of mine named Tayo came in through my dad’s phone and my junior brother was the first person who saw the message and said, “Dad, you have a message from Taye”. But when I got to realize it was “Tayo” not “Taye”, then I smiled because I understood he had word guessed. 

I myself am not left out of one of the common reading mistakes. 

In most cases, I only look at the first letter, then guess the word. This same mistake has now become major error readers do make while reading.

Example of such is:  taking:  (Never as Nurse), (Shell as shoe), (Canoe as Canon), (Taking as Talking), etc.  This happens as a result of reading the word phonetically. And simply because those words share several of the same letters in common. 

This same action can also be in form of word substitution wherein no doubt the reader is not reading the print, instead of guessing his/her own word from the context. Examples include taking:  (Home as House), (Class as School), (Angry as mad), etc. 

To fix the problem of word guessing, you just need to learn to read phonetically. Furthermore, you also need to get yourself acquainted with words that look similar but are different in both sound and meanings.

Patience is the way to achieving this. 

4. Use of Unknown Vocabulary Is One of The Common Reading Mistakes You Should Avoid 

Most readers get trapped in unknown vocabulary, hence this is one of the majority of the mistakes we make while reading. It’s a problem because it’s capable of consuming ur precious time in the process of wanting to know all the meanings of every word used in the passage.

It is somehow funny some people go the extra mile in having a dictionary with them while reading, so as to check any vocabulary they come across. But in an instance like this, you forget most things you might have read easily because you have divided your attention into two (for the book you re-reading and the dictionary you are consulting). 

However, in most cases, the meaning provided by the dictionary may not be in line with the context meaning, therefore causing problems in understanding and comprehension.  Most articles and books need to be viewed, but not closely analyzed.  While reading, you should be clear if the meaning of a particular word (vocabulary) is really important worth wasting time on searching for the meaning. If not, just move on. 

It may interest you to know that even most of the writers of the content don’t understand every word written by them. 

But to get rid of this problem, you should be perfect in English vocabulary. You can achieve that by learning at least 5 words with their meanings in a day. By doing so, you will be surprised the number of words you will capture just within a span of a week.

Mind you, the more words you know, the easier it will be to recognize them in reading, thereby making it easy for easy understanding and comprehension. 

5. Blending Difficult Is Another Common Mistake

This happens when words that are meant to be pronounced together as one is segmented, or split separately, then pronounced as different entities.

In most cases what is being pronounced might be correct but may lack meaning because you have segmented that, which is not meant to be segmented.

How you can get rid of this is by learning to smoothly blend sounds. Check out how to develop on smooth blending

Conclusion 

You must remember that it is only by reading you can expand your vocabulary and learn a lot of things about the world. The more you read, the more you know. However, the only way you can understand what you have read is by avoiding these common reading mistakes. 

If you enjoyed this, you should read how to motivate yourself to study even when you are tired.

So, where do you like to journey to first now that you are good to travel?